Anthony offered me his bakkie. He said I was welcome to use it to do my weekly shopping. Except I didn’t hear him at first. I had to cross the street to hear him out. Churchill road is quite a thoroughfare on any given day and yet our neighbourly small talk continues unabated. There have even been times when I have had to wait a full minute before I could skip across the traffic and hear what Anthony had to say. It can be awkward though, to stand there and wait for a gap while we face off with smiles against the din of rushing cars.
They have plenty of cars themselves though, Anthony and his family. Certainly more cars than their driveway can handle. On some days it seems as if they spend all their energy sliding their gate open, driving a car out and then another in, and then closing then sliding the gate closed again. That is apart from the car or two parked on the street. But then their children are grown and have jobs so it is only natural. And the daughter has moved into the house next door with her new husband and baby. Before they moved in a small old lady with white hair lived there. I don’t think she had a car. Her life must have been as plain as it looked from across the street, with its bare lawn and low fence. She died soon after I moved in here.
To be without a car can be quite pitiful. Especially if you live in a tree lined suburb like Plumstead. Anthony saw me and my old flatmate – the mumbling grumble – walking out of our driveway on a Friday evening and presumed, quite correctly, that we rushing to the train station to get some place. He offered us a lift.
Crammed between the mumbling grumble and Anthony, with the gear stick assaulting me in unspeakable ways, I made small talk about grocery shopping. I was on about how you need not only estimate the total bill, but the total weight as well since you had to carry it all the way home. I thought it was quite funny and so did the mumbling grumble. (As matter of fact she could be quite pleasant to me. On that particular evening she was good humoured enough to laugh at my jokes and let me drag her through the streets of Woodstock, on foot and in the dark to get to a bar. She had had the fright of her life on the way and I don’t blame her because my heart skipped more than once walking those gloomy streets.) Anyway, Anthony must have found the grocery story more sorry than funny because the following weekend he offered me his bakkie for whenever I wanted to go shopping and that I only need ask.
At the beginning of the year, when the we were in the throes of a summer that I now take a sweet delight to remember, Anthony and his wife, Lean, had a different occasion to be kind. During the English cricket team’s fantastic tour, Anthony phoned me up on my mobile and offered me a pair of tickets for the test match. I had already been to the first two days but I took them all the same. I went with Nieva, who was visiting from being a nurse in London, and joined the neighbours at the Newlands cricket stadium. We sat though an uneventful two sessions in temperatures over thirty degrees before Lean relented and the two of them went home. Neiva and I stayed for the rest of the game.
It was a few months until I took up the offer of the bakkie. Lean had phoned one weekday afternoon and made the offer anew. If Zanele – the Christian virtue who restores the house to civilisation every Saturday morning – hadn’t insisted I buy a new mop, I might not have taken up the offer. At the Pick’n Pay, I stocked up the bulky things to take advantage of the transport. I had bags of sugar and a lot of vegetables. Tobre used to do the shopping for the house and never worried me about the money for it. It struck me as strange to see myself shopping on my own in that cavernous Kennilworth Centre in the gloomy last half hour before the Pick’n Pay closed its doors for the day.
Packing my supplies for the month into the back of a pickup truck, an idea came into my head that this was how it was always going to be. I will in time buy my own second hand bakkie that I will use to go everywhere wearing an old greasy cap. I will be the kind of person who long ago gave up on making a good income but instead focused on repairing what I already had and taking bargains wherever I could find them. Unlike Anthony, who only used the truck to go surfing, it would be my only mode of transport, and a disintegrating one at that. I will continue to use it and fix it for years until no one can remember the time when the truck was common place. Then, after I have neither the money nor the strength to fix it, the car will sit in the driveway as a relic to amuse passersby. After my death, a neighbour some years younger than me, will buy the house for his newlywed daughter and they will move in.
Fragments of Freedom 